Over five years of using TextExpander I’ve saved myself typing whooping 400,000 characters (a medium-size PhD dissertation). Yet, there are always new ways to use this amazing software. Here are three recent examples I’ve introduced into my workflows:

1. Names with accented characters

I work with people whose names contain accented characters (å, ö, č, etc.). I agree with this argument that correct spelling of names is very important, but disagree that Microsoft Word’s Autocorrect is the best solution. Neither do I want to change the Keyboard layout just for one character or to search for that character in Apple’s Character Viewer. Instead, I use TextExpander to automatically change “Hakan” to “Håkan”, “Jorn” to “Jörn” etc. Then I don’t need to lift my fingers from the keyboard to keep my colleagues pleased with seeing their names correctly spelled.

More so, the place I live in is called Bosjökloster and it is in town of Höör. Guess what my snippets [,,bos] and [,,hh] refer to! These two I use at least several times a week filling in various forms.

3. A standard OmniFocus task

When I receive an email with a flight booking I always create an OmniFocus task to check-in online the day before the trip. When I check in I need to have the booking number at hand. Here is my workflow for this.

Select the booking number in the email message

Press the OmniFocus’ clipping shortcut (e.g. ⌥⌘X)

Type the TextExpander abbreviation for a checking-in reminder (e.g. ,,chk)

TextExpander the task a title and fills in the necessary OmniFocus information: project (“Travel“), context (“Desk:Mac“) and the relevant dates which it asks me to specify. (It also adds text @simple to the title of the task which I use in my OmniFocus perspectives to filter simple, medium and major tasks.). The check-in open date becomes the OmniFocus’ Defer until date and the flight date becomes the OmniFocus’ Due by date. I do not even need to specify the actual dates because OmniFocus would also understand “mon” (next Monday) or “+1w” (a week from today). Then it just to press ↩ and I have my OmniFocus task with a link to the original email enclosed as the note. Here is the snippet:

If you don’t use Apple Mail you can slightly modify this workflow. First, copy the booking code to the clipboard. Then press ^Space to start a new OmniFocus task, then fire the slightly different snippet below. It inserts the content of the Clipboard into the title of the task. The rest is the same.

6 Responses to Three more tips on using TextExpander

I use TextExpander for all kinds of single-character substitutions – Greek symbols, mathematical symbols like a product sign or a true minus sign, true prime marks (not apostrophes), section and paragraph symbols… just awesome. Unfortunately it has a bug that often such symbols get pasted in using the wrong font, even though they are defined as “plain text” symbols and thus ought to use the font of the context they are pasted into. They often end up as some weird Japanese font, and have to be changed. Have you experienced this? Got a fix?

Apple has a new keyboard capability: hold down any key, and it gives you a choice of all the variants for that letter, including umlauts etc. Here is what I get from holding down the e key: èéêëēėę
So you no longer need to use edit/special characters.
This capability was added with either Yosemite, or 10.9 – I can’t even remember!

Nea, this simply means that you can enter dates in TE fields using OmniFocus format. You can enter formal dates (e.g. 1/1/15) or ‘natural language’ dates (e.g. ‘next Monday’. These dates will be inserted in the relevant OF fields so that your task will have Start (Deferred to) and Due date.

An alternative might be ‘bosj’ as a snippet for Bosjökloster: hoor for Höör. This wouldn’t break the writing flow, the lovely ‘tink’ would remind us that a snippet had activated (were you not looking at the screen).
‘Love the blog Aleh, really useful and thought provoking, RSS always bring me straight back.